Desirable difficulties for learning with Elizabeth Bjork and Robert Bjork (Ep 66)

Well, particularly with things like so what students will often do is if you post solutions for them for a problem set and they don't know how to do the problem, they'll read the solution and then they read it and it makes sense to them.

But then that doesn't mean they can do it.

It just means they could read the solution.

Right.

And so that's the difference between retrieval practice.

If you don't know how to do it, okay, get help, read the solution, whatever.

But you need to be able to, you have to put it away and be able to do it without looking at the solution.

So I get your point.

And then the other thing that students do a lot, especially now, is they watch YouTube videos of people doing problems.

And then again, they think they know how to do the problem, but they don't because they just watch someone do it.

They didn't actually do it themselves.

That applies to so many different situations.

There was one famous study done on training in artificial respiration.

And people watch the steps being done on a dummy or whatever.

And yep, yep, got it, got it, got it.

And now a little while later, now you got to do it.

And you realize it's one thing to follow it, but to kind of produce it independently is another level of And that's very true in sports as well and great range of situations.

One thing, we may not understand the engineering or physical details of a recording device.

But we can kind of understand its functionality.

It gets recorded and it can be played back.

But humans, in all key ways, work almost the opposite of recording devices.

Our learning machinery, so to speak, doesn't work.

We wrote one paper one time about just all the ways we differ from any such recording device.

So to really learn You have to be producing, not just reading.

And so all of these kind of principles that go beyond the surface of information are what make it very recallable in the long term.